OWL Labs spent a decade as an Amazon favorite. Is the Meeting Owl 5 Pro built to change that?

I keep seeing the same pattern play out. Someone travels to Europe or the US, sits in a meeting room with a strange black-and-white device shaped like an owl sitting in the middle of the table, and comes back asking me where to buy one. No local presence, no distributor pitch, no channel partner pushing it. Just a device that did its job well enough in someone else’s office that they wanted it in theirs. That kind of pull is rare in this industry, and it says more about OWL Labs than most of their own marketing does — the sort of brand story we’ve been unpacking across our meeting room hardware guide.

Who built the owl, and why?

OWL Labs was founded in 2014 by Max Makeev and Mark Schnittman, two engineers who had worked together at iRobot. Schnittman’s own account of the founding story is a familiar one to anyone who has worked remotely: he was dialing into meetings from across the country and felt like a fly on the wall, a burden on the call rather than a participant in it. The tools available at the time, basic USB microphones on one end and full video conferencing systems on the other, didn’t solve that feeling. He and Makeev raised a $6 million Series A and set out to build something that made a remote person feel like they were actually in the room.

The first Meeting Owl shipped in June 2017: a single 360-degree camera with eight omnidirectional beamforming microphones, built to spot whoever was talking and turn toward them automatically. It was small, it was self-contained, and critically, it was something you could put in a cart on Amazon and have on your desk two days later. That accessibility is a big part of why the device spread the way it did, one team at a time, rather than through a traditional enterprise sales motion.

How did a single camera become a whole product line?

The Meeting Owl Pro followed in 2019 with a sharper 1080p sensor and a longer microphone range. Whiteboard Owl arrived in 2021, built specifically to capture whiteboards without the usual glare problem. Meeting Owl 3 and an Expansion Mic came in 2022, the same year OWL Labs closed a $25 million Series C led by HP Tech Ventures — the venture arm of the same company behind HP Poly — bringing total funding past $47 million and putting an HP board seat inside the company. By that point OWL Labs said more than 130,000 organizations were using its products, including 84 of the Fortune 100.

Owl Bar came in 2023 as the company’s first front-of-room device, meant to pair with the center-of-room cameras rather than replace them. Meeting Owl 4+ landed in 2024 with a 64-megapixel sensor and full 4K video. Each step added more resolution, more range, and more integration options, but the core idea never changed: one device in the middle of the table, seeing and hearing everyone at once.

Why does a room without a straight front need a camera like this?

This is the part of OWL Labs’ pitch that actually holds up when you’ve sat in enough real rooms. Most video bars — the Neat and Logitech families included — are built on an assumption: that a room has a front, a screen, and people facing it. A lot of rooms don’t work that way. I have sat in U-shaped setups, round tables, and repurposed spaces with no clear front wall at all, where a front-facing bar simply cannot see half the people in the room. A single 360-degree camera in the middle of the table does not need a front. It sees whoever is speaking, wherever they happen to be sitting, and that is a genuinely different design philosophy from almost everything else in this category.

Is the Meeting Owl 5 Pro proof that OWL Labs wants to be taken seriously by IT?

The Meeting Owl 5 Pro, unveiled in February 2026, is where the strategy shift becomes explicit. It ships with single-cable USB connectivity for BYOD rooms, wired multi-device pairing over Ethernet, HDMI and USB-C ports (the same HDMI question we raised in why Jabra took until 2026 to add HDMI bypass), and an MDEP-ready architecture built for Microsoft’s device ecosystem. It is priced at 2,599 US dollars and, unlike most of what came before it, OWL Labs is not simply putting it up for sale online. The company launched an expanded Channel Partner Program alongside it, with margin flexibility, deal registration, and dedicated partner support, and described the Meeting Owl 5 Pro in its own announcement as “among the company’s first channel-first offerings.” That is a company openly saying its past products were not built around a reseller network, and this one is.

Two months later, in April 2026, the Meeting Owl 5 Pro earned Microsoft Teams certification, which OWL Labs called the completion of a “fully certified portfolio” alongside the already-certified Meeting Owl 3, Meeting Owl 4+, and Owl Bar — a certification path with real licensing consequences, as we broke down in whether the MTR license is worth it. CEO Frank Weishaupt’s own framing of it was blunt: enterprise IT buyers need solutions that deploy easily, perform consistently, and integrate without friction into their existing infrastructure. That is not language a company uses when it is still selling primarily to individual buyers with a credit card and an Amazon account. It is language aimed squarely at the IT procurement desks that decide what gets deployed across hundreds of rooms at once.

So has OWL Labs actually made the jump?

The honest answer is that the Meeting Owl 5 Pro is the clearest signal yet that OWL Labs wants to be judged as an enterprise vendor rather than a clever gadget people discover on their own, but a signal is not the same as an outcome. Whether the channel partner program actually builds the kind of regional distribution and support network that IT departments expect from a Poly, a Logitech, or a Jabra is something that plays out over the next year or two, not something a launch announcement proves on its own. What is already true, and what I keep seeing firsthand, is that the device earned its reputation the hard way, room by room, before any of that channel strategy existed. If you’re weighing a 360-degree camera against a traditional bar for your own rooms, our consultation page is a good place to talk it through.

Sources

1. Owl Labs company history, founding, and product timeline (Wikipedia)
2. Owl Labs’ own account of why the company was founded
3. Owl Labs’ timeline of the Meeting Owl product line
4. Owl Labs’ Series C funding announcement with HP Tech Ventures
5. TechCrunch coverage of the Series C round, customer base, and HP partnership
6. Official Meeting Owl 5 Pro launch announcement, including the Channel Partner Program
7. Meeting Owl 5 Pro’s Microsoft Teams certification announcement
8. Owl Labs’ own U-shaped room solutions page